If you are like me and have your machine set up to dual boot between multiple OS's then you are probably familiar with the following screen:

I installed Windows XP Professional, followed by Vista Ultimate 32-bit Edition. So I have the following choices:

Earlier Version of Windows

Microsoft Windows Vista

In Windows XP, if you had a dual boot set up you can rename boot items simply by modifying your boot.ini file. You'd see something like the following. And it was a simple matter to rename "Windows XP Professional" or "Windows 2000 Professional" as you saw fit.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

In Vista, the boot.ini has been deprecated and is no longer used. So how does one rename the vaguely named "Earlier Version of Windows"?

Just recently, I was exploring the PAE, or Physical Address Extension, feature in Vista and something caught my eye.

The command I used to enable my PAE was: BCDEdit /set PAE forceenable

The command I used to make sure the setting changed was: BCDEdit /enum

Windows Legacy OS Loader
------------------------
identifier              {ntldr}
device                  partition=D:
path                    \ntldr
description             Earlier Version of Windows

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {current}
device                  partition=C:
path                    \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description             Microsoft Windows Vista
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {bootloadersettings}
osdevice                partition=C:
systemroot              \Windows
resumeobject            {24f09df2-46fc-11dc-bcba-e9d5c4ed2e43}
nx                      OptIn
pae                     Default

Opportunity was knocking, and I wasn't going to miss the chance to take advantage of it.

A little deductive reasoning and I had the following command: BCDEdit /set {ntldr} description "Microsoft Windows XP"

And then I received a "The operation completed successfully." message for my effort. And after a quick reboot, all is well.